I was trapped in a submersible, lodged in a borehole surrounded by ice. My air gauge had dropped below eleven hours. Calculated for a crew of three, I guessed my supply would last a solid day. More troubling were the batteries. Power levels were down to seventy-six percent. That was sufficient if I was merely piloting the vessel, but the Valkyries would drain that quickly.

Stay calm. Think it through. There are two ways out of Vostok. You can try ascending using the lasers and see how far you make it, or you can attempt to locate that subglacial river that runs out of the northern basin and forge a trail beneath the ice sheet all the way to Prydz Bay.

Eight hundred miles in twenty-four hours, squeezed beneath the ice sheet in total darkness without a GPS?

That was suicide.

The depth gauge indicated the sub was only eighty-seven feet above the lake, leaving 13,012 feet of ice overhead. Using the computer, I calculated the power requirements. Even in a best-case scenario, the Valkyries would run out of juice 1,244 feet short of the surface.

Either way, I was a dead man.

Frustrated, angry, and overwhelmed with fear, I pounded the back of my skull against my chair’s headrest. My decision to pull the umbilical and regain control of the ship had been foolhardy and not very well thought out. By severing communications, I had lost the ability to negotiate with the Colonel for my life. In effect, I had regained control and condemned myself to be buried alive in ice.

How had I managed to find myself in this predicament? The Colonel had threatened to kill me, for what? Because a sensor in my bloodstream indicated I had spent eighteen hours hanging out in another dimension. The whole thing was so ludicrous it seemed laughable, only the Colonel actually believed it enough to erase my existence.

So instead, you did the job for him, asshole.

I glanced at Ben’s lifeless body still tied to the seat in front of me. Leaning over his body, I loosened his bonds and searched his pockets. I located the iPhone in his jumpsuit and powered it on to check the photo bucket.

As I had suspected from Ming’s images, Ben had climbed to the mountain’s summit with a sense of purpose.

There were only two photos. The first revealed an icon embedded in what appeared to be a dark metallic surface. Based upon the climbing axe in the shot, the figure appeared to be about a meter-high and featured ten glowing fist-size objects set in triangular pairings. The upper three were white, the middle six were red, and the one on the bottom was violet.

The second image was blurred and had caught the side of Ben’s face as he had fallen from the face of the summit.

I returned to the first photo.

I’ve seen this configuration before…